Smartphone or other touch panel-equipped electronic devices are recently commonplace. Touch panel control eliminates the need of displaying a pointer on the screen as contrasted with existing mouse control for computers or others. To control a touch-controllable electronic device, the user may simply move and touch his finger on an icon on the screen without moving a cursor that is conventionally required for computers or other electronic devices. As such, touch panel technology enables quick control thanks to omission of cursor control.
Despite such advantageous, however, touch panel techniques require the user to directly touch the screen, rendering it unavailable for remote use. For remote control, touch-controllable electronic devices thus resort to other control devices, such as remote controllers.
Korean Patent Application Publication No. 2010-0129629 published on Dec. 9, 2010 (hereinafter, document 1) discloses a remote electronic device controller capable of generating a point at a precise position. According to the technique, two cameras are used to capture an image ahead of the display and generate a point at the spot where the extension line of the user's eye and finger meets the screen. However, such is very inconvenient in that a pointer should be inevitably generated by a pointer controller as a preliminary step for controlling the electronic device before the user's gesture is compared with a pre-stored pattern for specific operation.
Further, according to document 1, in order to detect the spot where the extension line of the user's eye and finger meets the screen, three-dimensional (3D) spatial coordinates are produced through 3D coordinates calculation. In this case, each of the user's eye, finger, and selection point for operation control should be detected through images captured by camera at different positions. Thus, it is difficult to precisely detect selection points, and detection of more precise selection points may increase the load of calculation.
Moreover, remote electronic device control by the reference technique is limited to electronic devices equipped with a large-screen display, e.g., large enough for control icons to be noticeable to the user positioned away therefrom. Thus, remote control is possible only on the front surface of the electronic device, and the user should be positioned in front of the front of the electronic device for control.
Further, operation control of an electronic device is performed by communication with a camera controller, and for remote control, the electronic device should be located at a fixed position. This limits the application to only stationary electronic devices.
Korean Patent Application Publication No. 10-2010-0129629, titled “Method for controlling operation of electronic device by motion detecting and electronic device adopting the same.”
Korean Patent No. 10-1235432, titled “Remote control apparatus and method using 3D modeled virtual touch of electronic device.”